Analysis of Vodafone and its competitive environment Essay

Analysis of Vodafone and its competitive environment - Essay Example Conclusion 10 5.1 Summary 10 5.2 Final analysis 10 5.3 Conclusion 11 5.4 SWOT 11 References 12 Appendix 13 1. Introduction The continuous increase of competition in all industries worldwide is one of the major challenges that modern organizations have to face. The ability of a particular firm, Vodafone, to secure its market position is reviewed in this paper. Particular emphasis is given on the competitive environment of the organization but also on the firm’s current strategies for competing its rivals. The report aims to show the potentials of the organization to increase its competitiveness; at the same time, effort is made to show whether there are any factors, in the firm’s internal or external environment, that could threaten the organization’s performance, either in the short or the long term. A series of theories and frameworks are employed in order to explore the issues described above: the Porter’s Five Forces and the Life Cycle Analysis are used for analysing the industry in which the firm operates; the analysis of the industry in which the firm operates is included in the first part of the paper. ... 2. Overview Competition in the UK telecommunications industry is strong. The findings of the industry analysis and of the internal analysis lead to the assumption that Vodafone has developed appropriate strategies for securing its market share in UK. Despite its significant performance, Vodafone needs to identify strategies that would help to the standardization of the firm’s performance in the future. The firm’s existing strategies seem to be quite satisfactory, in terms of their value in supporting the organization’s competitiveness. Still, there are certain issues related to the firm’s internal and external environment that need to be addressed appropriately, aiming to improve the firm’s position towards its competitors. 3. Industry analysis 3.1 Porter’s five forces Porter’s five forces model aims to help the identification of industries, which are highly offered for organizational growth, since the risks involved are limited (Barne y 1991); thus, the operations of a firm that would decide to enter such industry would not be threatened. Another important characteristic of the particular model (Figure 4, Appendix) is the following one: it helps to understand the effects of ‘a firm’s attributes on its environment’ (Barney 1991, p.100). After identifying the conditions in a firm’s environment, it would be easier to check whether the firm has achieved ‘to establish a value created strategy which is quite difficult for competitors to duplicate’ (Barney 1991, p.102), i.e. whether it has a ‘sustained competitive advantage’ (Barney 1991, p.102) or not. In order to understand the potentials and the